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rAPPido Review: Teen Book Finder by Yalsa

For librarians, autumn is not just a time of bright leaves and cool winds, of whirling dervish students breezing in on a wave of panic. It is also a time where the publishing industry gathers their troops and begins to publish the best-of lists as well as the shortlists for the literary awards. Which means I make a visit to one of my favourite and most informative site, YALSA (the Young Adult Library Services Association) to see what books I am missing from my collection. To my great delight, they have developed an app that searches all the books on all their lists of teen books, from the awards to the best-of lists!

My librarian heart is seriously going pitterpat.

The first page you see when you download the app is the hot picks of the day:

There are many ways in which you can search:

For example if you go into genre, you see an alphabetical list of books tagged with that specific genre:

A word to the wise: the Young Adult genre covers 12 to 18. As you well know, there is a vast distance between the two ages. The books reflect this diversity. There is a good example of this in the following screenshot, where you have A Clockwork Orange (obviously for almost adult teens) just above A Monster Calls (a book about a young boy who is dealing with the fact that his mother is dying of cancer).

Here is the bibliographic information they provide:

YALSA tells you what list it appeared on as well as a summary of the book. I happened to love this book so I added it to my favourites:

I tried to use the “find it” option, but it could not find a library with it in it, but I have it in my library so there must be some missing widget/software/something I need to get in order for the two to connect…

If you click on the award icon in a book’s bibliographic record, they will give you some information about the actual award:

This is a simple, well-designed app to recommend to your avid readers as the YALSA lists and awards cover best teen fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, best adult books for teens and even audio books.